Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Goodmorning, post-quadrivial 18+-ers. I trust that there are scores of you reading this blog and that you're all scratching your little sleep-fuzzed heads right now and thinking, "Hey, now, what does Happy Pomo have in store for me this morning? Because haha this is a little embarrassing but I was so excited thinking about it last night that I couldn't even get to sleep. Which thing (sleep) is extraordinarily important to get and maintain, especially if you want to keep the weapons in your intellectual arsenal sharp and ready-to-use during your waking hours." And I know this is all a way of saying: This is the David Foster Wallace post, right? Even though it's got the Don Delillo title, but you already did the Don Delillo post, so it's the David Foster Wallace one, right?

Well, no. You're wrong in almost every way. There will be a DFW post, but it's as of now sine die so that'll be an extra-special surprise for you, you little insomniacs. So. Rather than risk excessive pleonasm I'm just going to say straight out: the DFW post is coming when you least expect it and it's going to be really awesome, like a hallucinatory rainbow. OK? That's settled.

I'm actually darkening the proverbial, blogospherical "door" right now to tell you a little story about someone else who, like you, gentle reader, is extra-special. His name is Jay Murray Suskind, and he's a professor in the Department of Popular Culture at Blacksmith College. Why do we care about Jay Murray Suskind? Well because he wrote an article on DFW called "An Undeniably Controversial and Perhaps Even Repulsive Talent" and it was a pretty interesting article, all things considered, and it was published in the journal Modernism/modernity which should make at least some of you happy.

So you're just trotting your eyes along this article by Prof. Suskind and everything's fine until you come to this gem (you've got to click on it to see it):

And you're thinking, Wow hey waitaminute this has absolutely no place in a scholarly article. And then you're like, Oh Jesus I think I know the name Jay Murray Suskind from somewhere. He's a character in White Noise. And he cites How I Conquered Analysis: Ten Ways to Dupe Your Therapist by Infinite Jest's very own Hal Incandenza (aka The Incster):

So there you go. A review of fiction written by fictional characters. This is the kind of thing that a certain aesthetics-and-irony-loving demographic would really appreciate. Take off those non-prescription glasses and that keffiyeh, gentle reader: that's you! Does it make you happy that Prof. Suskind has overcome the considerable handicap of not existing to author a scholarly article? Does it depress and/or disturb you that academic scholarship is falling prey to the same literary hijinks and self-referential hoohaw that have become very de riguer, fiction-wise? I don't know how you feel, but I'm feeling pretty great right now, and that's because I'm going to eat a vegan gyro in about 2.5 hours.

Goodnight and god bless.

p.s. Many thanks to the lovely folks over at Infinite Tasks of Philosophy who brought my attention to this. I'm giving them credit for this entire post. You should really check them out.

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